The Federal Court has taken CSIS to task for using the international “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to monitor the electronic communications of Canadian terror suspects when they travel abroad.

In a summary of a classified ruling released Monday, Justice Richard Mosley said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had “breached its duty of candour” to the court by failing to disclose the practice.

The ruling concerns the methods that CSIS uses to track Canadians who are considered threats to national security and have left the country — possibly for terrorist training or to fight in foreign conflicts.

We need to be able to monitor those individuals who represent a threat

In January, 2009, the Federal Court issued a warrant for the first time authorizing CSIS to harness the eavesdropping capabilities of the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) to spy on two Canadians who had gone overseas. Since then, the court has issued a number of similar warrants.

But the court said it had recently learned that in addition to listening in on the suspects, CSEC had also been asking the other members of Five Eyes (the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand) to intercept their communications.

Such interceptions were not authorized by the warrants and the issue of leveraging Five Eyes had never been raised by CSIS when it applied for the warrants, the court said. It said all such information “must be disclosed” when CSIS applies for future warrants.

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CSIS and CSEC both said they were reviewing the decision. “Everything that CSIS does, alone or with trusted partners, is consistent with Canadian law and Canadian values,” said spokeswoman Tahera Mufti.

CSEC released a similar statement saying, “Everything that CSEC does, including assisting other Canadian security and law enforcement agencies in their lawful duties, is consistent with Canadian law and Canadian values.”

The Security Intelligence Review Committee raised concerns in its latest annual report about the reliance of CSIS on the Five Eyes allies to eavesdrop on terror suspects who had left Canada.

It said there were “clear hazards” to the practice since allies could decide to take action on their own. Targets could be detained or harmed based on information provided by CSIS, it cautioned.

Canada’s national security apparatus has been struggling to adapt to the evolving terrorism threat, which now revolves around radicalized Canadians who travel abroad to join terror groups in places like Pakistan, Somalia, Mali and Syria.

“We need to be able to monitor those individuals who represent a threat here or abroad, or [an] even bigger when they come back,” Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney told a security conference in Halifax on Sunday. “So in that sense, I agree that we need to be able to work with our partners collectively to tackle … this new evolution, if we can put it that way, of terrorism and of their targets.”